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Updating the FTSE 100 symbol for Microsoft Money 2000

I use Microsoft Money 2000 to manage my home finances. It’s old (read out of support) and a bit confusing when it comes to investments, but it suits my needs and I don’t see any need to upgrade to the latest version right now.

One of Money’s many features is the ability to download stock quotes from MSN Money but mid-way through last year this stopped working properly, resulting in the following message when attempting to update online quotes:

Online Quotes and Exchange Rates:

Money was unable to retrieve a quote for FTSE (London). The symbol $US:FTSE is invalid. To correct an invalid or expired symbol, go to the Details for that investment from the Portfolio and correct or delete the symbol.

After relaunching Money, I was able to successfully download FTSE data.

The less technical method of tracking the FTSE is to create an investment to watch, using the $UKX symbol. Whilst this works, it is quoted in pounds (not pence), so is inaccurate by a factor of 100, and doesn’t seem to allow comparisons (for instance, it is often useful to compare a stock against an index).

Now all I need to fix is that investment I made in March 2001, just before the markets took a tumble…

I had trouble finding it at first, but Cygnus Hex Editor had various methods of searching in it’s find dialog – I had to use the Find Data function. From memory (my PC with Money on it has gone away for repair this week), I think I pasted the US:FTSE text, which then became 55 53 3A 46 54 53 45 – I then had to edit the hex codes, adding the missing 00s to get 55 00 53 00 3A 00 46 00 54 00 53 00 45. After that, the find seemed to work okay.

I did the mod to get around the FTSE index change in Money 2001 using the hex editor. However i only found one entry not two. It seems to be working OK though. I’m wondering if there is a way to add the FTSE 250 index or the FTSE all share index. I didn’t find that adding an index as a dummy share was very useful.
Thanks for the great advice though.

I failed with the text editing as Money 2000 returned a corrupted file error on trying to re-open the modified file. However, having re-ticked the FTSE 100 option in ‘prices to download’, the old symbol is now working again (Aug 2009)!

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